Tag: Film

Thrice Told Tales #3: Emma

September 24, 2023

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Clueless (1995)
Emma (1996)
Aisha (2010)

About a third of the way through our first viewing of Clueless (which was in a theater), my wife whispered to me (and yes, I know we shouldn’t be talking in the theater, we’ve been working on this), “They’re doing Emma, they’re doing Jane Austen’s Emma.”

We had gone to see a silly teen comedy. Of course, this was 1996, which was still the Golden Era of Teen Comedy. Though we didn’t know it, the era was coming to an end (just as the Super Hero Era is fizzling out.) The teen comedies of John Hughes (beginning with 16 Candles in 1984 and ending with Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987) were over. One could argue the first Teen Comedy of the era was Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982. That film was written and directed by Amy Heckerling, who didn’t make another teen comedy until… 1996’s Clueless.

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Classic Visual Effects

Gary McVey

August 2, 2023

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Films have always relied on visual magic, on camera and laboratory tricks, never more than today. Special photographic visual effects existed for a century before the advent of computer-generated imagery, and often play a part in our fondest memories of favorite movies. There were few electronically created effects of any kind before the Eighties, and we’ll eventually get to the CGI era, but first, a guide to the classic processes and trade secrets that made the magic that most of us loved, from Metropolis through 2001, from Inside the Third Reich through Back to the Future. It’s the story of a distinctive twentieth century craft that still has relevance today.

Every history of special effects starts with George Melies, who was a fairground illusionist who brought trick photography to audiences in Paris. Other early films mostly ignored effects, except for a perennial fantasy favorite, ghosts, easy to do with a double exposure. Silent films began using glass shots: painting an elaborate setting on a sheet of glass and filming through it. Simple, but if you’ve ever seen the YouTube clip of Charlie Chaplin roller-skating in a department store, getting “dangerously” close to a “sheer drop”, you’ve seen how good it could look, even back then, if you lined it up right.

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20 Years Ago: The Prize

Gary McVey

April 10, 2023

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February 2003. The transatlantic forecast was cold and overcast, with winter squalls and a chance of chemical or nuclear warfare. The immediate post-9/11 era was not a great time to travel. I went to the Berlin Film Festival to present an American Cinema Foundation prize named for Polish director Andrzej Wajda, for merit and courage in filmmaking. Chosen by a jury from eastern and central Europe, that year the winner was Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov.

After months of a military buildup, much of the world was apprehensive to the point of dread about an impending special military operation: America was about to launch war in the Middle East, and we made no secret of it. Most of our allies begged us to reconsider. By 2003, the goodwill we retained from the end of the Cold War had waned; the worldwide admiration we’d earned with our prosperity was rapidly fading with it. Yet not one of the invited guests connected our American prize to war in Iraq. Russian, Polish, and German officials came to the award ceremony in a gesture of post-WWII, post Cold War reconciliation. Today, with Ukraine as the backdrop, the Polish Film Institute, the European Film Academy, and others are calling for boycotts of Russian films and cultural events. I understand the emotion, but I think it would be a mistake, not just culturally or morally. It would be a fateful blunder.

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